1 - Social Marketing
There are several popular sites today which are providing great results for small business owners.  Social marketing sites are free or very low cost.  Becoming a popular user on any of the sites which generate a lot of traffic can send plenty of leads your way.  A few of the more popular sites are digg.com, LinkedIn, and facebook.  Make sure you spend the time to legitimize your profile as it’s easy to spot users who are in it just for a quick buck.

Another side of social marketing is blogging and micro-blogging.  Setting up a blog for your website can help open up your company to the public and appear less private.  In addition, you can provide expert advice from your blog and build a loyal readership.  When your readers become interested in actually buying a product you sell, they will most likely turn to you first for their purchase.  Setting up a blog is easy.  There are several free templates available to load to your own website.  Or, if you would rather not deal with html specifics, use a service like typepad.com.

Micro-blogging is relatively new, however it’s a great way to add feedback to the communities and to monitor what people are saying about a particular subject, company or idea.  The most popular is twitter.com.  You can search twitter using a twitter-specific search tool to see how much “traffic” certain subjects are getting.  For example, a search for conference call (http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=conference+call&u=&d=) will show you who on twitter is talking about conference calls - like being on a conference call, or listening to a great conference call.  Try out tweetscan.com for other searches like your company name.

Forrester research recently posted about small businesses using social media for marketing during a recession -

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2008/02/why-social-appl.html.

2 - Conference Calling
Conference calling technology has been around for many years.  Smart businesses have learned to harness the power of conference calls to promote their products, brands and company.  In addition, non-profit groups and other organizations utilize conference calling to promote their ideas or to help their members out.  One example is a conference call hosted by San Francisco Entrepreneur (www.sfentrepreneur.com/) with guest Seth Godin (http://www.accuconference.com/blog/SethGodinConferenceCallMeatballSundae.aspx).  The call brought in hundreds of participants.  Your company could host a conference call and generate hundreds of leads.  A regular conference call could produce loyal listeners.  Setting up conference calls is simple and the total cost versus a trade show is much lower.

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3. How To Start a Corporate Blog
4. Internet Marketing For Your Small Business
5. Lead Generation and 3 Great CRM Solutions

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Small Business General Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.